Sustainability Products and Data

S&P Global’s innovative sustainability products help companies and investors identify prospects for growth, mitigate risks, position for emerging regulations and maximize their performance against global goals. In line with the International Sustainability Standards Board’s definition of sustainability, S&P Global offers a holistic lens that provides perspectives on all aspects of sustainability, including risk, opportunity and impact.

S&P Global provides a range of sustainability data and solutions to meet the needs of our clients to identify growth opportunities and mitigate risks. Our market benchmarks, forward-looking research and data for public and private markets are tools to enable clients and stakeholders to make informed and strategic decisions. In 2022, all business divisions achieved strong performance across our sustainability offerings.

Case Study:
Net-Zero Senior Strategy Group

In 2022, S&P Global established a cross-divisional Net-Zero Senior Strategy Group comprised of commercial and product-related leaders, to consider each division’s strategy to support the net-zero energy transition. These commitments include:

↳ S&P Global Ratings

• Enhance training for ratings analysts, to continue building our understanding of stakeholder and credit risks and opportunities related to the net-zero transition.
• Identify opportunities to enhance data and analytics available to analysts, and source additional data as relevant.
• Develop further research, tools and analytics to assess the path and implications of the transition and share this research through thought leadership publications.

↳ S&P Global Market Intelligence

• Include net-zero data in workflow tools within relevant products and solutions.
• Identify opportunities to increase use of net-zero content.
• Develop additional areas of data and coverage to better enable client workflows supporting net-zero objectives such as climate models and analytics.

↳ S&P Global Commodity Insights

• Continue to develop and promote new price assessments to provide transparency for energy transition markets including alternatives to hydrocarbons and clean energy.
• Include Energy Transition and net-zero outlooks in Commodity analytics and consulting, integrating Energy Transition themes into energy industry conferences.
• Highlight new Energy Transition and net-zero offerings and thought leadership through S&P Global content platforms.

↳ S&P Dow Jones Indices

• Measure and publish net-zero-related metrics for every headline, security-based S&P index published on our website.
• Launch a global equity net-zero index, including emerging markets, and engage all clients having net-zero ambitions, at a minimum, around S&P DJI’s net-zero solutions.
• Convene an advisory panel to provide the Index Committee governing our net-zero indices with insights for incorporating the best techniques and latest science into index methodologies.

↳ S&P Global Mobility

• Feature net-zero content in all Mobility business lines and enhance net-zero analytics.
• Continue to build out dedicated net-zero-themed products within the Planning Solutions portfolio.
• Enhance the visibility of net-zero-related content and analysis in our client-facing platforms and develop metrics to track client use of net-zero-related content.

S&P Global Ratings incorporates environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors that materially influence creditworthiness and sufficiently visible as part of our credit rating analysis. To further enhance transparency into our credit rating analysis, we publish:

• ESG credit indicators, reflecting our opinion of how material the influence of ESG factors is on our credit rating analysis of rated entities in corporate, financial institutions and other sectors.
• Dedicated paragraphs discussing ESG credit factors in credit rating reports for rated entities in corporates, financial institutions and other sectors.
• Research commentaries providing greater insight into credit-relevant trends on climate and other factors.

S&P Global Ratings also provides sustainable finance services and solutions, including entity-level sustainability assessments, Second Party Opinions (SPOs) and Transaction Evaluations. Our SPOs, which are independent assessments of a company’s financing or framework’s alignment with market standards and typically provided before any borrowing is raising, include Use-of-Proceeds SPOs (Green, Social, Sustainability) and Sustainability-Linked SPOs.

In December 2022, S&P Global acquired the Shades of Green business from CICERO, further expanding the breadth and depth of our SPO offering. Shades of Green has been championing SPOs in the global green financing market since 2008, after publishing the very first SPO on the World Bank’s Green bond framework, and remains the largest external reviewer by volume globally. At the heart of all its SPOs is the multi-award-winning Shades of Green methodology, which assigns shadings to investments and activities to reflect the extent to which they contribute to the transition to a low-carbon and climate-resilient future.

Since 2016, S&P Global Ratings and Shades of Green have collectively evaluated $460+ billion in green financings, delivered 500+ SPOs and received 12 industry awards. *As of March 2023

With S&P Global Ratings’ global experience in assessing sustainable finance risk, coupled with Shades of Green’s deep expertise in climate and sustainability, we are ready to help clients navigate access to the public and private sustainable debt markets, with solutions that deliver the rigor and transparency that investors and lenders demand.

S&P Global Market Intelligence offers a growing suite of sustainability data and analytics for private and public markets. Market Intelligence first introduced sustainability data on the S&P Capital IQ Pro platform in mid-2020, and continued to enhance the Cap IQ platform in 2022, to maximize client value.

S&P Global Market Intelligence has a comprehensive suite of sustainability offerings to meet the needs of different stakeholders, including public and private equity investors, banks, corporates and insurance companies, whether it be to help with portfolio or private equity analysis for informed decisions, to assess climate risks inherent to company assets, to meet regulatory requirements or to understand risks associated with third parties. In 2022, we launched enhanced Physical Risk Exposure Scores and Financial Impact dataset to help understand and manage the physical and financial exposure of corporates and physical assets to climate change. It has coverage of more than 20,000 companies, representing over 98% of global market capitalization, and is built on a proprietary database of over 3.1 million asset locations linked to corporate entities.

As private market investments gain even more momentum, investors are keen to assess the impact of sustainability factors against their investments. Our iLEVEL portfolio monitoring platform centralizes sustainability data collection, analysis and reporting. We have also formed strategic partnership with Novata, a leading sustainability data platform, with the goal of providing private market investors with a comprehensive data solution.

Understanding the impact of climate change is a key element in assessing credit risk. Climate Credit Analytics (CCA) enables counterparty and portfolio-level analysis of climate-related financial and credit risks for thousands of companies, across multiple sectors. CCA translates climate scenarios into drivers of financial performance tailored to each industry. These drivers are used to forecast complete company financial statements under various climate scenarios.

↳ Supporting Humanitarian Efforts in Ukraine

To help reduce security risks for charities providing aid to those affected by the war in Ukraine, S&P Global Market Intelligence offered complimentary access to Foresight Security planning capabilities to humanitarian aid organizations so they may access location-specific security and intelligence information, enabling them to monitor the rapidly changing operational environment to assist in their efforts.

↳ Fostering Maritime Safety

To help protect endangered whale species, the University of California Santa Barbara’s (UCSB’s) Whale Safe tool displays whale and ship data to help prevent ship collisions with whales. Whale Safe uses S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Sea-web ship data to help accurately identify vessel movements and provides transparency for safety, sustainability and social responsibility practices through its vessel vetting and vessel ratings for safety and environmental performance.

S&P Global Commodity Insights provides benchmarks, data and insights for global commodity markets.

With the integration of S&P Global Platts and the historical IHS Markit’s Energy & Natural Resources businesses, the division is now known as Commodity Insights.

Energy Transition solutions, which enable customers across the energy value chain to manage the risks and opportunities presented by the energy transition, are a growing part of our portfolio and are focused on four key areas:

• Environmental Markets – Price assessments, data and insights for environmental markets including, voluntary and compliance carbon markets, low-carbon gas, methane performance certificates, crude carbon intensity, hydrogen, ammonia, battery metals, recycled plastics, renewables and biofuels.
• Alignment to Net-Zero – Integrated, long-term scenarios for energy supply and demand across multiple climate warming pathways and net-zero cases.
• Technology & Investments – Data and insights covering clean energy technologies; qualitative and quantitative analyses of renewable energy sourcing strategies; and research and outlooks for battery metals and electric vehicles.
• Emissions Management – Standardized data and insights on greenhouse gas emissions across the energy value chain and industrial sectors, and carbon intensity assessments reflecting emissions associated with the production of underlying commodities.

In 2022, new offerings include:

• Launched Clean Energy Technology Analytics and Clean Energy Procurement.
• Broadened our suite of emissions solutions, with new and enhanced products for modeling the emissions and cost economics of refineries and chemical plants.
• Developed the first international renewable electricity certificate (I-REC) price assessments for Brazil, India and Turkey, which will increase pricing transparency within these key energy markets.
• Produced the first carbon intensity measures for all six crude grades forming Platts’ Brent benchmark, making Brent the first carbon-measured global benchmark.
• Launched satellite-driven methane intensity calculations and corresponding methane intensity price premiums for 19 U.S. natural gas production basins.
• Built the first-ever carbon intensity estimates for diesel, gasoline and jet fuel, along with carbon offset premiums.
• Built a comprehensive new dataset of estimated emissions from upstream oil and gas production, complementing our core upstream global coverage of over 6.8 million onshore wells, 60K+ assets and projects, and 33K+ fields worldwide. These datasets are broken down by emissions source and greenhouse gas type.

We believe collaboration can fuel and scale urgent interventions toward a low-carbon future. Hence, we established a partnership with Pexapark that will enable us to develop a new benchmark for renewable energy pricing and continued to collaborate with Xpansiv and Viridios AI, with a focus on enhancing the transparency of voluntary carbon markets. We are also proud to partner with GTI Energy and the National Energy Technology Laboratory on the Open Hydrogen Initiative, dedicated to unlocking the potential of hydrogen as a fuel alternative.

S&P Dow Jones Indices offers around 200 headline Sustainability indices, with Sustainability assets under license exceeding $33 billion in 2022. Our indices support an array of climate and sustainability investing needs, with forward-looking approaches in line with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, as well as climate benchmark standards aligned with the EU Low Carbon Benchmark Regulation.

↳ Case Study: S&P 500 ESG Index

In 2019, S&P Dow Jones Indices launched the S&P 500 ESG, designed to underline strategic, long-term, mainstream investment products. Intentionally broad, the S&P 500 ESG Index seeks to reflect many of the attributes of the S&P 500 itself, while providing an improved sustainability profile through ESG exclusions and selection of companies for inclusion based on their ESG scores. This flagship index continued to gather assets in 2022, growing to $8.7 billion by year-end.